


Essays Not About Dragon

by anthropophobicameba



Series: Essays [2]
Category: A Practical Guide to Evil - erraticerrata
Genre: Other, non-fiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:20:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22052413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthropophobicameba/pseuds/anthropophobicameba
Summary: A collection of essays about things and characters other than Dragon.Currently contains a singular essay, which is about the way tropes regarding sexual violence are used in A Practical Guide to Evil.
Series: Essays [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1587277
Kudos: 6





	Essays Not About Dragon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So back in September I needed a distraction, and since my friends had been reading and talking about it for a while, I decided to finally read A Practical Guide to Evil. After finishing it, I discussed it some with said friends in our group text, where I griped and theorized about a variety of things in the story. I was going to send a text about some of my problems with the way the narrative uses Malicia. You know, a text. A paragraph, maybe. A small comment. But I couldn’t find a way to phrase it right, so I copied into a different document to finish. 
> 
> It took me a week to compose it.
> 
> It just kept growing.
> 
> This essay is, literally speaking, a text message. I sent it, as a text message. All 2000+ words of it, were a text message.As such, the organization is somewhat haphazard, the grammar is very casual, even by my standards, and it was written with specific people in mind. You are most likely not those people, and I apologize for any resulting confusion stemming from that, or any of the other issues mentioned.
> 
> When I began writing this essay, the most recent chapter posted was **Interlude: Rise, Rise** in Book 5. When I finished it the most recent chapter was **Interlude: So Smile, Tyrants**. As such, anything posted after that chapter was not taken into consideration. I believe my conclusions stand, however. 
> 
> Oh, and sorry about the footnotes. 
> 
> **Warnings:** There is a lot of discussion of rape and tropes regarding rape in this essay. Additionally, there is some discussion of transphobic and sanist tropes, a good deal of discussion about trauma and PTSD, some mildly foul/blasphemous language, a very brief mention of incest, and mentions of eugenics. Oh, and Game of Thrones spoilers, somehow.

I will now attempt to string together my poorly organized thoughts on Malicia.

As a disclaimer/to provide context, I really like the character, which will undoubtedly warp my opinions here. I'm attributing this to my inherent fondness for expertly manipulative characters that _aren’t_ blatantly based on the creators having skimmed a pop-psychology book about serial killers*, and to the fact that she works as an interesting foil to an OC I've been tinkering with.

So, I'm pretty sure she's meant to be a deconstruction of the "Evil Seductress" trope, and at least is a better go at that than the non-deconstructions I mentioned earlier.

I don't really feel like I have the knowledge base to discuss the way sexual violence is used in her backstory, and in the story in general. I will however, have to try anyway, as that’s the root of a lot of the things that are awkwardly bouncing around my head. I will say it’s at least handled better than is standard** in high fantasy, but that is a very low bar.

This is one of those cases where I feel like the author wanted to refute the Bad Trope but didn’t _quite_ know enough to do it well? The other example I can think of right now being the two trans characters, who we know are trans because of, in one case, a deadname reveal, and, in the other case, … an adam’s apple. Which isn’t even… there are lots of cis woman who… and it isn’t even a real…

Anyway, the point there being: Definitely great to have trans characters! Also definitely could have been done better***.

Relatedly, it’s definitely great that APGtE isn’t full of graphic rape scenes/threats, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t problems with the way rape is handled in story.

There are three times I can remember where rape comes up for reasons other than assuring the audience that it definitely isn’t happening. The two I will not be talking about are, literally chapter one of book one, and when Princess Rozala offhandedly described (now former) Prince Arnaud as a rapist, which will definitely come up again, especially with Hanno’s “I feel like maybe the angels want me to murder him” aside in the most recent extra chapter, which given Tropes and Things has me very worried, even though I think the author probably wouldn’t go in any of Those directions, he’s definitely going _a_ direction, and he does like fleshing out tropes, even ones that just sort of fundamentally suck, and goddammit I said I wasn’t going to be talking about this one.

The remaining example is, of course, the one I am continuing to avoid talking about because holy hell am I in over my head.

Alright, no, for real. I will talk about this. This is the thing I set out to talk about.

The remaining example, and the one that is referenced most often, is Malicia’s backstory as an unwilling concubine to the previous emperor. The word “rape” is never actually used in conjunction with her, which is kind of weird in that way where I sort of whether the author got uncomfortable about the choices he made and didn’t want to actually look at them directly, but she’s pretty unambiguously meant to be a survivor. 

There are a lot of tropes about the way trauma stemming from sexual violence affects characters. Few of them are _wrong_ precisely, trauma can cause or inspire dramatic changes in goals, beliefs, behavior… but the ways fiction presents these are frequently stilted and dehumanizing.

Part of the dehumanizing aspect comes in how frequently plots about rape center family members and romantic partners (usually shown as cis men) as opposed to victims/survivors (usually shown as cis women). Trauma originating from witnessing others’ suffering is far from uncommon, but that is rarely how these plots are presented.

APGTE was, according to the author, originally going to be from Black’s perspective. I feel that this shows, at points.

There is this thing where every time (I think it is every time, it is at least very near that) we see a conversation between Black and Malicia from Black’s perspective he has an aside about his rage on her behalf. And that’s not necessarily bad. Very little of this is concretely a bad thing, versus just… kind of uncomfortable, in a hard to place way.

Now I did say I wasn’t going to talk about that first example, but it turns out I was wrong because I think it’s relevant here. So the story is launched when Catherine interrupts a city guard attempting to rape a girl in a literal dark alleyway. The guard and his superior try to kill both Catherine and the victim to cover up the crime, then Black and Captain intercede, saving them both. Captain escorts the victim away, and she is never seen again (so far, at least). Black then tells Catherine that “I’ve come to believe, over the years, that those who are wronged should have a say in how that wrong is redressed.”

Now I’m not going to say almost being murdered does not count as “being wronged,” but. Even as she makes the decision to kill them, she does not think of “they almost killed me,” but of what they were going to do to a character who litERALLY IS NOT EVEN GIVEN A nAME. There is a near literal objectification here, where the victim does not have any agency of her own, and is only there to launch the plot and show that our protagonists are Not That Kind of Evil. She exists so that Catherine can be incensed on her behalf, can kill for her without her being consulted at all.

(There’s also just this line about her being more interested in begging to be left alone than fighting back, which maybe was just Catherine being shitty but is not irrelevant here.)

There are some parallels, here, though admittedly not terribly strong ones. Black had his Name before he reunited with Alaya, there’s a decent chance they would have tried to take the throne even under vastly different circumstances, Alaya undeniably had a far more active role in the dispensing of justice. 

Still though, we see far more of Alaya’s trauma from Amadeus’ perspective than we do her own.

I really like that Black and Malicia (or, more accurately, Amadeus and Alaya) have a queerplatonic life partners situation, I really like that it isn’t presented as lesser than a romantic relationship (arguably, it’s presented as greater than, but that’s probably another conversation). I really don’t like how some gross romance**** tropes seem to have been imported into it.

So, and I promise I’m going somewhere with this, Game of Thrones wrapped up some unknowable time frame ago, I think it was this year, and as far as I, a person who has never and most likely will never watch it, could tell literally everyone hated the ending. One of the things they loudly***** hated about it was when the audience stand-in generally decent character “had to” kill his girlfriend(/half-sister??? I think????), for the good of the people. The framing of this was: she had gone mad (keep a pin in this one), she was dangerous, she had to be put down.

(This character had previously been raped on the show, though as far as I can tell so had nearly every female character on that hell-show so I’m not sure that it actually has much bearing here.)

Within the conceit of the show, the killing may in fact have been necessary******, but that isn’t really the problem. There was a choice made to write it that way, and in making that choice they played into some… stuff. I’m not actually going to get into all the ways the Trope is No Good Very Bad, because many other people have already done so and I find the prospect exhausting, but I will touch on one thing that I feel deconstructions sometimes neglect: The way it’s framed as a mercy killing.

Because the character (in this specific example, but also in most occurrences of the trope) is mentally ill, or sorry, “mad”, they will be depicted as worse than dead, as incapable of making decisions or understanding the situation, as an un-person. I don’t really want to dwell here, I really hate how everything I write seems to eventually need to talk about eugenics, but needless to say, this sort of perception causes a lot of real world harm.

It is hard to say _exactly_ how we are meant to perceive Malicia’s current actions. I was somewhat reassured when, in Friday’s interlude, Hakram seemed to believe her more reasonable than Catherine assumes. I’ve been somewhat confused as to why so many characters (and more so, commenters) seem to believe she is acting suddenly erratic, and this would seem to suggest that it is not in fact an objectively true thing, but at least in part a misconception from biased characters.

That wouldn’t really fix everything, but it would at least make it less Very Bad.

Still, the way “mad” is thrown around when describing previous Tyrants, the way Black seems to think she is going the way of those tyrants, it’s got a shape to it.

And while they are not a romantic couple, the same basic plot line, with the one having (“””having”””) to murder his partner, how tragic, kind of feels like it’s in use here.

APGTE is ongoing, which makes it hard to say for sure that any one trope or plot line is in play, because we don’t know how the story ends, and there is always a chance for subversion*******.

We do not know what Amadeus is thinking on this, we haven’t seen his POV for a while in the main narrative, and even when we have we haven’t really seen his thoughts on their conflict, which makes drawing conclusions somewhat difficult. His lack of consideration is in and of itself somewhat telling though. In the epilogue to Book 4 he makes a mental list of villains he could potentially be bait for, and Malicia isn’t on it? Which is odd, given she’s the one we see take the bait.

We do see Malicia’s thoughts (although we haven’t for a while, likely to preserve reveals to come). Paraphrasing, they include “Catherine only thinks there’ll be a civil war because she underestimates us,” and “He is part of my soul.” Which seem… somewhat inconsistent, with other characters’ perception of her/the situation.

I find this stressful, at an admittedly personal level.

Anyways so the conflict between them, and I suspect Amadeus’ perception, can be in part traced back to Malicia’s… interesting perspective on the merits of trust (or rather, the lack there of********). Said perspective in turn is somewhat specifically linked (I say somewhat because he technically says “faith” and not “trust,” but I feel they are synonymous in this context) to her trauma by Amadeus in the epilogue of book two.

Now “difficulties with trust” is definitely an actual trauma effect that many people have. It is not unique to sexual trauma, although it might be more strongly correlated with trauma inflicted by others (as opposed to e.g. a natural disaster*********). It is a thing that happens, and there is nothing fundamentally wrong with depicting it. It’s just… uncomfortable, in context. Especially if the takeaway is “trusting even one person is a mistake,” which… is not not the message being conveyed here.

A lot of the issues come in in how she is the only rape survivor in the story who is more than a prop. Because of this, anything true of her risks becoming just… how survivors are, in the world of APGTE.

And now I’d like to go back to those three examples, as well as the fourth I set aside. 1) The city guard, a literal stranger in a dark alleyway. I mean a Fantasy Cop, which is pretty accurate, but still a literal stranger in a dark alleyway, 2) Arnaud, who is expertly manipulative in a way that does in fact seem to be blatantly based on the creator having skimmed a pop-psychology book about serial killers. He is likely meant to be a “sociopath,” a word that should rarely see use outside of sarcastic quotation marks, 3) The one I’ve been discussing, sort of, where a teenage girl was kidnapped in order to effectively be a sex slave to a much older man, who is at various points more or less said to have been driven to insanity by his loss to the Wizard of the West, and 4) The implication that rape is expected on the part of invading armies, due the repeated and explicit forbidding of such.

So there are a few patterns here. One, there’s the general implication that rape is something (cis) men do to (cis) women, despite sexism supposedly being not much of a thing in this universe (the author made a comment to that effect at some point). Two, there is in two of the examples an implication of rape being a result of mental illness and/or neuroatypicality, which… bad. Three, with the potential exception of Arnaud where we don’t have enough information yet to know, rape is something committed by strangers.

So it’s seems like the author has a somewhat simplistic understanding of sexual violence. Which has me less confident that we’re heading for a subversion/subversions.

While not nearly as bad as many variations, the choice to answer “why is the Evil Seductress so Seduce-y?” with “a history of sexual abuse” is always going to be kind of iffy, and should be done extremely carefully, which I’m not convinced it was, here.

The prologue to Book 5 has an aside from Malicia where she notes that it had been years since she had thought of Nefarious, which I could see being there for one of three reasons. One is that this is meant to reassure that nothing she’s doing is attributable to trauma and there are no unfortunate implications to be had here, which would be clumsy (and very unconvincing, given the above on trust), but in a way the author has been before. Two would be that this is a self-deception, perhaps supported by the fact that it is literally speaking untrue, he’s come up in her internal monologue before, though mostly in a (for lack of a better word) professional context, which isn’t really what she was talking about. Three is that this is foreshadowing, and that some kind of Something is going to reactivate dormant traumas. That could just (“just”) be Amadeus’ betrayal, though in the writing of this I’ve developed a horrible sinking fear it’s going to involve Arnaud.

A lot of how things go is likely going to depend on how much the author actually knows about (c-)PTSD and sexual violence vs. how much he’s learned from cultural osmosis. I do not trust him to do well, but neither am I certain he will do terribly.

I don’t have a conclusion at the moment, so much as many questions. I suspect that there will be a part two, once more becomes clear.

*So much more to say on this, little of it is very relevant here. I will probably have broader comments on this at a later date, some of which actually tie into Dragon things, which should be interesting.

**"Standard," but far from universal. There are a lot of excellent fantasy authors & books out there. There are also a lot of mediocre authors & books out there that still manage to not use rape as a cheap plot point.

***Not to get to bogged down in this one example, but there’s also a fair amount of in-narrative cissexism, which kind of undercuts what I suspect was intended to be the implication of a transphobia-free world.

****Meaning tropes applied to romantic relationships, not tropes applying to the romance genre.

*****Not a complaint, I really enjoyed reading/occasionally watching everyone tear it to shreds, and I probably enjoyed it more because I didn’t really care much about the show at all.

******I have not watched the show, I say “may” because I genuinely do not know, and also, I do not particularly care.

*******There’s an additional problem for me, where, because I am fond of the character, I am having difficulty distinguishing between “this uncomfortable compression feeling in my stomach is due to Issues and Implications” and “this uncomfortable compression feeling in my stomach is due to a character I like being in distress.” I apologize for any poor deductions made as a result of this ambiguity.

********“I trust people to act according to their nature. Anything more is sentimentality,” She said out loud and presumably on purpose, in a context where it could become a quote she is known for.

*********Although in general PTSD is more common when there is insufficient social support after a traumatic event, meaning even where people are not directly at fault, there are often still interpersonal factors.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you'd like to comment, please do! My linguistic capacity has been very low lately, so I may not respond, or I may not respond in a timely manner. I'm sorry about that, and it probably has nothing to do with you.


End file.
